“Ryman’s squares do not attain a fixed perfection … on the contrary, he renounces perfection by a detail, an anomaly…”

—Gerard-Georges Lemaire

For Ryman, the “object-ness” of his works comes before all else. While Sign, painted in 1982, may appear as a perfectly painted white square of canvas, the work reveals itself to be intentionally disrupted in the most minor of ways. A bridge to the wall and back, Ryman’s aluminum fasteners serve both functional and aesthetic purposes, adding visual interest to an otherwise pure white shape. In doing so, Ryman allows us to see his paintings as no more than spaces hung on a wall.

As Cordy Ryman, the artist’s son, described his father’s career, "Dad started working in the mid-1950s and no one cared, and in the '60s no one cared, and then in the '70s maybe a couple people cared. He worked on his own style of painting for a long time before they blew up."ⁱ Indeed, the road to Robert Ryman’s artistic success was a slow crescendo with earnest beginnings – the artist was never formally trained, and instead gained all of his “schooling” from observing artworks while working as a security guard at MoMA from 1953-60. By 1982, however – the year that the present work was painted – his efforts were finally beginning to be recognized. In 1981, Ryman was the subject of a one-person exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and in 1980, a retrospective of the artist’s work was held in Zurich. Sign was first exhibited at The Mayor Gallery, London, in 1982 along with a selection of other recent paintings and has been held in the same private collection since 1988. 

This commitment to creating work for decades regardless of critical acknowledgement is a testament to Ryman’s dedication to exploring the potential of a medium to its fullest, and this dedication is made manifest in the complex formalist investigations the artist takes on in works such as Sign.

In the 1980s, Ryman’s work would become more sculptural. Seeking to push the traditional notions of painting even further, he focused on making it part of the viewer’s space in novel ways. Painting on disparate media such as fiberglass and exploring the textural layer of his paints, Ryman also achieved this through the use of metal brackets, opting for these in place of his earlier patches of masking tape. He would design each set of brackets specifically for each piece and have them constructed by a local metal fabricator. For the artist, these fasteners were “emphatically real points of contact between painting figure and environmental ground.”ⁱⁱ Though these fasteners would vary from painting to painting in their physicality and, in turn, compositional significance, Ryman would typically use aluminum, as is the case in the present work, heralding it for being a lighter, “nicer” metal. 

The use of Enamelac paint in Sign is also significant. A flat white pigmented shellac primer, “Enamelac is a sealer,” Ryman described. “…Shellac comes from trees. It’s a resin; it’s a natural substance that dissolves in alcohol. So, Enamelac is really alcohol-based.”ⁱⁱⁱ Ryman’s detailed description of the medium is a testament to his understanding of the behavioral and scientific properties of his materials, and how they interact with not only the support but the surrounding environment. In the case of Enamelac, Ryman once described it as resulting in a “dry, kind of dead-looking finish,” referring to the notion of being devoid of life.^iv  Just as the artist would gravitate towards certain materials for their glossy and reflective qualities, he valued Enamelac for its ability to instead absorb light. Sign, at its core, is a stunningly concise statement about what paint can do. “How many ways, Ryman has repeatedly and pragmatically asked, can one take the most reductive kind of painting – the apparently one-color-one-format work – and generate from it a complete, indeed protean world,” Robert Storr writes.^v Indeed, in the case of Sign, this world is formally rich and subtly articulated.

ⁱ Howie Kahn, “Home Is Where the Art Is: The Ryman Family,” Wall Street Journal Magazine, November 17, 2015, online.

ⁱⁱ Robert Storr, Robert Ryman, exh. cat., Tate Gallery & Museum of Modern Art, London & New York, 1993, p. 33.

ⁱⁱⁱ Ibid, p. 130.

^iv Ibid, p. 132.

^v Ibid, p. 10.